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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
It should come as no surprise that, since the rise of the personal computer in the 1970s, cyber-criminals have remained one step ahead of government efforts to prevent or punish their crimes. They steal, sabotage and destroy electronic data, and the law plays catch-up. Early attempts to prosecute these crimes under traditional trespass theories and larceny statutes proved flawed, as such statutes generally do not cover electronically stored data. Since then, legislators have acted with varying degrees of success in their effort to target computer-related crimes.
The CFAA
Prosecutors' weapon of choice in this field may soon be the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. ' 1030, in particular with respect to crimes involving employee theft of confidential information. Although the CFAA was principally aimed at hackers bent on stealing information or disrupting computer functionality, as well as criminals capable of gaining control over systems vital to everyday life, it has been interpreted by influential federal courts to prohibit ' and thus criminalize ' a broad range of employee uses of employer computers. This development is all the more important because the federal government has increased the number of criminal prosecutions of cybercrimes over recent years. In February of this year, Attorney General Eric Holder created a Department of Justice (DOJ) task force on intellectual property. Then, in April, the DOJ announced it would devote significant new resources to combating intellectual property crimes, such as theft of trade secrets and computer hacking. This is not merely a stated policy; the DOJ has recently commenced prosecutions of several programmers accused of misappropriating computer code, including a high-profile investigation involving investment firm Goldman Sachs.
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